Little Earthquakes (35 page)

Andrew pulled onto the highway. “So you’re going to cook Christmas dinner next year?”

“Why not?” Becky said. “It won’t kill me to cook a ham, if it matters so much to her. And as for the things that matter to us—like where we go on vacations or where we live or what we spend our money on or what we name our children…”

“We’ll what?” he asked. “Lie to her?”

“We’ll tell her what she needs to know,” she said. “And then we’ll do what we want. What’s best for us and for Ava.” She patted her belly with his hand. “And for the niblet.”

“Ah. The niblet.” He beamed at Becky. “When are we going to tell Mimi about the impending arrival?”

“Let’s wait awhile, okay?” No matter how warm and fuzzy she was feeling toward Mimi, she knew that five and a half months of being quizzed about diet and weight gain and why she was still breast-feeding because surely that couldn’t be healthy would be more than she could take.

“I think you’re incredible,” Andrew said. He cleared his throat. “The day Ava was born, I thought I could never love you more than that, but I do.” He leaned close, touching her face, and kissed her softly. “You amaze me.”

“I love you, too,” she whispered. She tilted her seat back, adjusting the vent so that warm air blew over her knees. “I’m so tired,” she said, yawning.

“Take a nap,” he said and cleared his throat. “And thank you. If I forget to tell you later. Thank you so much.”

“Ain’t no thing,” said Becky. She laced her hands over her belly and closed her eyes. At some point, she dozed, and when she woke up Andrew was backing into a parking spot.

“Andrew?”

“Hmm?” he asked, looking over his shoulder as he steered.

“Do you think we’ll be good parents?”

He put the car in park and turned toward his wife. “I think we already are.”

On the twenty-third day of her separation, Kelly opened the mailbox to find two bills, an overdue notice from the library, and a large manila envelope containing a copy of
Power
magazine.

Kelly went upstairs and sat with the envelope in her lap for a while as Oliver crawled around the floor with his squeaky monkey toy caught in his undercarriage. “Bah!” he yelled. “Bah!” Then he turned around to look at her, and she gave him an encouraging wave and tried to smile. He yelled “Bah!” again and kept crawling forward. Finally, she pulled the flaps of the envelope open. The magazine slid into her lap. And there she was, on the cover, in her horrible lavender sweater with a burp cloth slung over her shoulder, standing in front of the closet, knee-deep in the ruins of her life. The look on her face, underneath the blow-dried hair and careful makeup, could only be described as bewildered. Bewildered and beaten down.
Having It All?
asked the cover.
Why a Working Girl Can’t Win.

She shut her eyes, and the magazine slid onto the floor. Oliver scooched himself over and reached for it with one chubby fist. She captured it in her own hands, guided it away, pulled the subscription card out of Oliver’s mouth, and flipped to the page that Amy Mayhew had paper-clipped open. There was a note attached.
Dear Kelly. Thank you so much for your help with the story. As you can imagine, it didn’t turn into quite the celebration my editors had imagined, but I think that what I wound up writing is much more honest—and may be more helpful to the generation of women who come next.

“Helpful,” she said and gave a rusty laugh. She set the baby in his high chair and opened a jar of oatmeal with peaches for his dinner and one for her own. Then she dropped her eyes to the magazine and read the opening sentences, beneath boldfaced words in quotation marks. It took her a minute to recognize the words as her own: “
THIS IS SO MUCH HARDER THAN I EVER THOUGHT IT WOULD BE.
”

Kelly felt her eyes move almost inadvertently to the third cabinet in the kitchen, the one where they kept the Scotch and the vodka. A nice juice glass full of either one—topped off, perhaps, with one of the leftover Percocets from her C-section—and none of this would hurt so much. She’d done that the first night Steve was gone, when she couldn’t reach Becky or Ayinde or Lia and she couldn’t stop crying. But it was only one step from vodka and prescription painkillers to bourbon and Tab. She was determined not to go down that road, but she was beginning to understand how her mother could have. When your life turned into one big disappointment, a frantic hamster-wheel blur of work and baby with no one to love you or tell you that you were doing it well, bourbon and Tab did start to take on a certain allure.

She sighed and started to read.

By all rights, Kelly O’Hara Day should have the world at her feet.

“Yes, she should,” Kelly murmured, spooning a bite of sweet goop into her mouth.

“Ghee!” cried Oliver. She fed him a bite of his own and kept reading.

Magna cum laude in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. A promising career in venture capital, followed by success in high-end event planning. Marriage to a Wharton whiz kid. But Baby made trouble.

“Oh, you did not,” Kelly said, slipping another spoonful of oatmeal and peaches into Oliver’s mouth. “It wasn’t your fault. Don’t even read this, sweetie. The media lies.”

O’Hara Day went back to work after a scant twelve weeks of maternity leave. Initially, everyone was excited—the boss, the clients, Day herself, who’d get to keep a foot in the working world while she raised her son, Oliver.

But in the three months since O’Hara Day has been back on the job, nothing’s gone according to plan. Colleagues and clients complain that O’Hara Day, twenty-seven, is distracted and ditzy, absentminded and hard to reach.

Ouch. Kelly squeezed her eyes shut. She knew her work hadn’t been perfect and that there’d been one too many conference calls she’d missed or conducted from home with Oliver in his Ultrasaucer (which frequently turned into Oliver on her lap or Oliver screaming in her ear or Oliver trying to chew the telephone or pull her hair or do both at the same time). There had also, of course, been the ill-fated Dolores Wartz party, and Oliver’s not-so-festive dirty diaper. But still, there was nothing quite like the pain of seeing what your coworkers really thought of you, spelled out in black and white.

In person, O’Hara Day, a tiny, peppy blonde, is friendly and outgoing, and in ten minutes’ time, we’re chatting away like girlfriends. But up close she looks like a woman on the verge of the proverbial nervous breakdown—overextended and frazzled, dependent on a fragile webwork of a babysitter and a husband who works from home to make her working days possible. “This is so much harder than I thought it would be,” she says, sitting in a living room that’s picture perfect only because a few months’ worth of clutter has been shoved behind closet doors. And if O’Hara Day, with her smarts and her savvy and her Ivy League degree, can’t successfully integrate a career and a family, it doesn’t suggest that things for other working mothers are much different—or that thirty-some years after the feminists waged a so-called revolution, the workplace is likely to become a kinder, gentler place for the women who will follow in her footsteps.

Kelly wiped Oliver’s chin. She found that she didn’t care much about the women who would follow in her footsteps. Nor did she care how foolish she looked in the magazine, how ridiculous she appeared in the picture, what unkind things her coworkers had whispered into Amy Mayhew’s ear. She was too spent, too overworked, and too tired to care about any of it anymore. “You know what the women who follow in my footsteps should worry about?” she asked Oliver. “Their husbands losing their jobs.” And what was this bullshit about “a tiny, peppy blonde”? As if any man in the history of recorded time had ever been described that way in print. And “chatting away like girlfriends?”
In your dreams, Amy Mayhew,
she thought.
My girlfriends don’t stab me in the back.

She went through the next hour and a half in a fog—bathing the baby, putting on his pajamas, reading him
Curious George
while he batted at the pages and tried to chew the back cover, nursing him, rocking him, easing him into his crib while he arched his back and held himself rigid and screamed for what had become his customary ten minutes before finally dropping off. Then she went back to the rocker and sat there with her feet on the Peter Rabbit rug, the red-and-white-
checked gingham sheets matching the red-and-white quilt, the lampshade and the wall hanging painted with her son’s name, his blankets and sweaters all folded and tucked away. It all looked perfect. The way she’d imagined it, sitting here rocking, when she was pregnant. What a joke.

She couldn’t keep working at Eventives. That much was clear. Not after they’d called her—what was it? “Distracted and ditzy.” Anonymously, of course. The cowards didn’t even have the guts to affix their names to their insults. But if she didn’t keep working, there was no way they could keep the apartment. Even if Elizabeth was willing to pay her severance and give her cash for the vacation days she’d never taken, between the health insurance and the car payments, it would be a matter of months before she couldn’t pay the rent.

So they’d move. She could find somewhere cheaper. Then she’d have to find another job. Full-time, most likely, because it was clear that she wasn’t constitutionally cut out for the balancing act of part-time work, and if she was going to be Oliver’s sole support, part-time wouldn’t pay well enough.

Maybe Becky would hire her, now that Lia was going back to Los Angeles. Or help her find something. Maybe she could be a restaurant consultant, helping them with their business plans, figuring out what neighborhoods would be receptive to what kind of establishment. Kelly started to get up out of the rocker, to reach for a notebook, to start making a list, and found that she couldn’t. No energy. No motivation. She felt like a toy with the batteries yanked out.

She groped for the telephone with her eyes closed, dialing the numbers by heart.

“Hello?” said Mary. “Kelly, is that you? Is something wrong?”

Kelly rocked herself back and forth. “Something is.”

“I’ll get the girls,” Mary said. There was a click as she put Kelly on hold. A minute later, she was back with Doreen in New Jersey, Maureen in San Diego, and Terry in Vermont on the line.

“What’s up?” asked Terry.

“It’s Steve,” said Kelly. “Well, actually, it’s everything.”

For once, none of her sisters were laughing at her. “What’s going on?” Mary asked.

“Steve left.” Horrified silence. “He lost his job.”

“I knew it!” Terry crowed.

“Terry, that’s not helping,” said Doreen.

“When?” asked Terry.

“Before Oliver was born,” Kelly said.

The sisters gasped identically.

“It’s been hard,” Kelly said. “I’ve been working and taking care of the baby, and Steve’s been just…well, I don’t know what Steve’s been doing.”

“Steve’s a loser,” said Mary.

“Let’s kill him!” said Terry.

“Terry, shut up,” said Maureen.

“He’s not a loser,” Kelly said. She rocked back and forth faster, knowing that this would be the hard part. “He just wasn’t cut out to work for a big company, I guess. He wanted to be a teacher, I think, and I didn’t want to let him.” She felt her throat tightening. “And he wanted to help with Oliver, and I wouldn’t let him do that, either. I just thought I was the only one who could do it right.”

“No way,” Mary said sarcastically. “Not you.”

“Please don’t make fun of me,” Kelly said, wiping her eyes. “Please don’t.”

“Sorry,” Mary said, laughing her rumbling laugh. “Sorry.”

Kelly held the telephone tightly, picturing her sisters’ faces. “It’s been awful. I was so angry at Steve, and I’ve been so tired, and…” She closed her eyes. “I just thought I had it all figured out.”

“You always did,” said Mary, but she didn’t sound judgmental. Just sad. “Do you need money? Or a place to stay, just to give yourself a break? We’ve got the guest room.”

“Where’s Steve?” asked Doreen.

“He left,” Kelly said. “He’s gone.”

“So we’ll find him! And kill him!” Terry said.

“Not helping, Terry. Oliver needs a father,” said Doreen.

Mary murmured in agreement. “You should call him,” she said.

“I know,” said Kelly. She hadn’t wanted to hear it, but she knew that it was true. “Call him and then what?”

“Tell him you’re sorry,” said Maureen. Kelly felt her temper flare—
Sorry for what? Sorry for supporting us? For paying the bills?

“You have to let people be who they want,” Terry said. “Even if it’s not what you want them to be.”

“Terry, that’s profound,” said Kelly.

“I know!” said Terry, sounding pleased with herself. “Like, remember the summer you wanted me to work at Scoops with you, only I wanted to be a camp counselor? It’s just like that!”

“Well, more or less,” said Mary.

“We’re here if you need us,” Maureen said. “And you don’t have to be perfect for us.” She paused. “It’s not all happily-ever-after, Kay-Kay. It’s only that easy in fairy tales.”

“But I have to try,” Kelly said, knowing that she was talking to herself as much as to her sisters. And it was Terry, the youngest sister, who answered for all of them.

“Yes,” she said. “You have to try.”

Mary agreed to take care of the baby on Saturday afternoon. Steve was waiting at the door of the coffee shop where she used to sweat and swear over her crappy laptop, and Kelly was jolted back to the first time she’d seen him, wearing that incongruous suit and tie, bending over her at a bar. No suit today, she saw. Steve wore a blue sweater that she didn’t recognize, khaki pants, and boots with snow dripping from the soles.

“Hi,” she said.

He looked up. His face was unreadable. “Hi, Kelly.” He cleared his throat. “You look good.”

I’m not,
she wanted to say.
I’m not good at all.
It had been five weeks since he’d left, and she’d missed him so intensely that it felt as if she’d had a headache every moment she was awake. For months and months, she’d been wishing him gone when she wasn’t daydreaming about ways to murder him and make it look like a shaving accident. No more dirty dishes to pick up, no more shoes to pick up and put back in the closet, no more messes to clean that weren’t made by Lemon or Oliver. She hadn’t thought about the silence, the way, after Oliver fell asleep, that the apartment was so quiet she could hear the rustle as she turned the pages of the Bible her mother had left her.

Try,
she remembered her sisters telling her.
You have to try.

“Come on in. It’s cold,” he said, holding the door open.

She stood on the sidewalk. Steve looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

“No,” she said. “I have to show you something first.”

“Show me…”

“We have to go for a ride.”

Steve had met her whole family only once before their wedding, on the day of Kelly’s graduation. She’d planned the day meticulously, making the reservation at Hikaru months in advance, buying her father a new jacket and tie for Christmas, taking Terry and Doreen out for sushi when they visited her on campus that spring. She’d made a half dozen phone calls the week of graduation, drilling her siblings on what they were going to wear, reminding Terry and Doreen to practice with their chopsticks, thinking that she’d learned her lesson with Scott Schiff and her family was going to behave like upstanding, middle-class citizens and not Coors-swilling, chain-smokers from some crummy seaside town in New Jersey.