The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (21 page)

“To tell you the truth, every time I think of doing anything else, I just can’t. I actually signed up for an abortion, and I went to the appointment, and then everybody there was a teenager, and they put me in a room by myself to get ready for the thing, and then Soapie called wanting to look at pictures of her relatives, and all of a sudden I knew that I wasn’t going to even
have
any relatives after she died, and so I put on my clothes and drove away.”

“I don’t think you should do this.”

“I know. But I am.”

“Jesus, God in heaven. How far along are you?”

“About twelve weeks.”

“You—Rosie, I don’t think you really want this. I know you. Sweetie, you’re not and I’m not—parent material. We aren’t.”

“Jonathan, be very, very careful what you say to me right now, because all this is going to be stuff I remember for our whole lives. We’re both going to remember it.”

“I don’t care if we remember it. I want us to remember it. Listen. Hear me out. You know us. We’re the uncommitted do-nothingers of life. Sweetie, we’re Gen Xers! Go ask Greta and Joe. Look at all our friends, as a matter of fact. We didn’t want that life. On purpose we didn’t want it. You can’t just change your mind right now and decide to go after something that didn’t even make sense twenty years ago, and now is probably certifiably insane.”

“I can change my mind, and I did.”

“Rosie.” He’s quiet for a long time. Then he says in a level voice, “When you went to that—that clinic place, did people try to talk you out of an abortion? Is that what this is about? Did you look at their evil pictures or something?”

“Nobody tried to talk me out of anything, Jonathan. That’s not what this is about.”

“Well, then, what the fuck
is
it about? Why are you ruining our lives?”

“I’m not ruining our lives. Jonathan, this happened to me, and I can’t let it go. I just can’t.”

“Listen to me: You are ruining our lives. This is the definition of ruining your life. You can’t change the rules for your life like this. Get it?”

She hangs up on him and, for good measure, throws the phone at the wall. All that happens is that the back comes off and the battery lands under the bed. She wishes the whole
thing had splintered apart so it could never get calls again, and she considers hurling it one more time. But she’s too tired, tireder than she’s ever been in her whole life. It’s like her arms and her legs simply have decided to shut down operations. She lies down on her bed, in the fetal position, staring into the darkness.

Fine. Fuck him. She’ll do this alone. She can change the rules for her life anytime she wants.

For Greta, who knows how to organize things and run a household of four kids and a busy physician, mobilizing an unexpected pregnancy is a piece of cake. She brings over a box of early-pregnancy maternity clothes, a load of books (including a very premature one on baby names), a chocolate cake made with flax seeds and health-giving carob instead of chocolate, and a list of instructors for Lamaze classes. And then she sits across the kitchen table from Rosie and says a bunch of comforting things, ticking them off like they’re in a list of The Etiquette of What You Should Say to Your Unexpectedly Expectant Friend.

“I know you can do this … you were always meant for motherhood … it’s going to be
great
,” she says, but none of it sounds at all convincing. Rosie has made the two of them a cup of pregnancy tea (also brought by Greta), and they sit drinking it together on the patio with the summer sun beating down on them.

“I know, I know,” Rosie keeps saying without any conviction. “I can do it.”

“Oh, hell. You’ve got to be scared out of your mind. So what does Jonathan think?”

Rosie doesn’t answer just right away. She’s busy tracing her forefinger along the water track left by her cup of tea. She allows two grains of sugar to join the trail, and she imagines they are grateful.

“Oh, God, he’s being a dick about this, isn’t he?” says Greta. “I was afraid that might happen.”

Rosie is sick of the Jonathan-bashing their friends do, but she can’t think of anything to say in his defense. They’ve been right about him all along. So she just sits quietly, feeling herself cut off like she’s building a barrier of sandbags around her heart. She doesn’t look up.

Greta’s cell phone rings, and she answers it and then gets her Official Mother voice on, having to explain to Sandrine how to start the chili recipe—“No! Don’t turn on the burner before you start chopping up the onions!”—and then she hollers about how Marco shouldn’t ride his skateboard without his helmet, and at one point she actually gets so worked up that she has to stand up and pace with the phone while she shouts down a child who’s determined to perform some other death-defying action. Perhaps it’s Henry inviting zombies for dinner, or has he outgrown that phase? Rosie doesn’t know.

She sits and waits for the storms of mobile mothering to subside, and then she gets up and goes inside, to the refrigerator, and pulls out some leftovers to heat up for dinner. She can’t remember if Tony will be home or not. Maybe this is a day he goes to secretly stare at Milo while he talks to him on the cell phone just yards away.

Greta follows her. She finally closes her cell phone and looks at Rosie. “Does this just scare you out of your mind when you see what you’re truly getting into?” she says. “Look at what I’ve turned into.”

“You love it.”

“Yeah, but it’s scary. And you’re going to be doing this same thing. I can’t wait to hear these sentences coming out of your mouth.”

“Not me. My child is going to behave itself and never turn on the burner before it chops the onions.”

That’s when Tony comes in the back door—he of the shaggy hair and the backward Red Sox cap and the hoodie sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped out of it. Greta’s eyes widen, and Rosie lamely makes the introductions while Greta is telegraphing Rosie little sparky-eye messages the whole time. Tony, of course, has never looked more Tony-ish, like an exaggerated version of himself, brash and young, and talking in his put-on New Jersey accent, telling about traffic all the way back from Fairfield.

“So you’re staying here?” Greta says to him coolly.

“Yes. He’s kind of the caregiver for Soapie,” says Rosie.

“Kind of? I am the king of caregivers for Soapie.”

“He is. That’s his official title: king of caregivers for Soapie.”

“And what? So, you’re the BFF?” he says to Greta, and she smiles. It’s the condescending smile she’d give to one of Sandrine’s friends, Rosie realizes.

“So what do you think of this baby bump, huh?” he says. “Quite a little surprise, huh?”

“Actually,” she says, “I always knew that Rosie had this in her. She just liked to make us think she wasn’t going to do it.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s gonna be amazing at this!” he says. “You can just tell. Look around the eyes—that’s where you see it the most. Like—see? I look at you, and I see you’ve got a whole bunch of kids you love. Are you a teacher, or something?”

“No, I’ve just got four of my own,” says Greta.

“Four!” he says.

“Yeah, I’m like a baby factory,” she says and gets up and gives Rosie a hug. “I’m going to go save my family from imminent destruction. Be careful with yourself, okay? And if you get freaked out when you realize that you’re going to need a father figure for this little kid, just remember that you have lots of friends who are out of their minds with happiness about this. We’ll all help you.”

She puts her hands on Rosie’s little pooch of a belly and closes her eyes. “I’m your Auntie Greta, you little pumpkin,” she says. “Don’t worry about that father of yours. He’s going to come around.”

“You bet he is,” says Tony. “Nobody can resist a baby.”

The next week, on a hot, humid day, she goes for her first prenatal visit, and she’s so nervous in the morning that Tony asks her if maybe he should drive her there. “I don’t have to be in Fairfield until school lets out,” he says. “I could take you if you want.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “I should drive
you
to Fairfield,” she says. “Then I could have a talk with Annie and Dena. Get them to come to their senses.”

But then, when she’s sitting in the waiting room, she really does wish he were there to keep her amused. He’d no doubt have a little routine to do about the other fathers: the thin guy who keeps checking his cell phone while his pregnant wife glares at him, and the man who looks like a trucker and keeps falling asleep on his wife’s shoulder.

Dr. Stinson takes the pregnancy news with the right amount of gravity.

“Well, this is certainly a surprise,” she says. She’s been Rosie’s no-nonsense gynecologist for the past twenty-five years. Each year an annual visit, an occasional bladder infection necessitating antibiotics, one or two conversations about feminist politics, a discussion of how women don’t really need to be married to be fulfilled, that sort of thing.

“To me, too,” says Rosie, and Dr. Stinson laughs dryly.

“You might have done this just a tad earlier if you were going to do this,” she says. “But, whatever. We have good
outcomes anytime. Congratulations,” she says flatly, pushing the rolling stool away from the examining table.

She snaps off the rubber gloves and smiles. She’s got crinkles now around her eyes, and her brown hair is shot through with gray.

Rosie sits up and moves down to the end of the table, covering herself with the gown. “But you do think I’m going to be okay, right?”

“Define ‘okay.’ ” Dr. Stinson scoots over to the sink on her stool and washes her hands. “There’s most likely going to be a baby in your life. Is that what you mean by okay?” She stands up and yanks paper towels out of the dispenser.

“Tell me the truth: am I too old?”

“Old, schmold. Actually you’re not even the oldest woman I’ve delivered this year. Most women your age have problems becoming pregnant. But once the pregnancy is started, most of them do come to term. Especially when they’ve passed the nine-week mark, which you obviously have.”

“So I can do this?”

“Your
body
can do this. I don’t know about the rest of you. What kind of support are you getting? How does Jonathan feel about this?”

Rosie is surprised that Dr. Stinson remembers his name, although they have mentioned him every year—his pottery, then his disenchantment with the creative life, and then the teacups. She doesn’t say anything.

“Oh, I see,” says Dr. Stinson. “So you’re going this alone?”

“Yeah.” Rosie looks down and starts ripping at a little edge of the paper on the examining table.

“Well,” Dr. Stinson says. “They used to call this a change-of-life baby. Lots of women have made this mistake. But then I guess it’s only a mistake if you think of it that way. It might
even be considered a blessing in some cases. Is that how you feel about it?”

Rosie laughs. “I’m still too scared to consider it a blessing.”

“Let’s listen to the heartbeat, shall we? Lie back down.”

Dr. Stinson goes and gets a little wand thingie and smears her belly with gel, and then hooks everything up. The sound that comes out of the speaker is loud and whooshing. It sounds like the wind blowing intermittently through a tunnel.

“That’s it,” says Dr. Stinson. “You hear?” She smiles. “That’s your baby.”

Rosie suddenly can’t speak.

“I know,” says Dr. Stinson. “It gets me every time, too. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“Listen, can I tell you something? I wasn’t sure at first, you know. I hope I didn’t jinx it or anything, but I didn’t know if I could handle it, and I made an appointment for—you know. And then I walked out.”

Dr. Stinson looks at her mildly. “Well, sure,” she says. “That happens, too.”

“Do you think—I mean, do you think I somehow communicated to the baby that—well, that I didn’t want him or her? Is that bad, do you think?”

Dr. Stinson looks at her very seriously over the top of her glasses. “You’re allowed to have doubts, Rosie,” she says. “Reasonable people do. The fetus doesn’t know from thoughts. It just goes on nutrients. But if you’re still not sure, then we have to move fast—”

“No, no. I’m sure now.”