The Whole Golden World (8 page)

He'd dropped the
R
:
of huh?
Joe's New York heritage was sneaking out the more upset he got. His parents had moved to Detroit from Brooklyn when he was a kid, and to this day, though he was a grade-schooler when they'd left New York, his accent would resurge when he got upset, along with a blue-collar cadence.

“Well, are you going to talk to your daughter now? And the boys?”

“Gimme a minute, I just walked in the freakin' door. I'll talk to her when I change out of my suit at least.”

 

Joe shook his head slowly, as if his head were suddenly too heavy for his neck. He picked up his beer and left her alone at the table, walking with a heavy step past the children's doors and straight up to his room to change.

The loneliness was so familiar she flashed back to September, when they'd tried to have a romantic evening out, the night Morgan had urged them to go, saying she'd keep an eye on the boys. Joe never made reservations at nice restaurants, and they ended up at a Chili's, where Joe's eyes kept drifting to the playoff baseball highlights on a TV behind Dinah's head. Conversation evaporated, and once home, Dinah stomped to their room, tore off her pretty bra and dress, and pulled on some sweatpants, turning out the light early and alone while Joe watched more TV.

Tonight was the same: a throbbing emptiness, plus the sense of jagged edges, like a piece of paper torn roughly in half.

She rested her head on her folded arms, her face turned to the side, toward the dining room wall. On the wall in curvy script was the phrase “Family: The Heart of Every Home,” which was supposed to look painted on, but from Dinah's view, the shiny edges were obvious. It was just a big tacky sticker bought for $3.99 at Walmart, after all. Not Martha-Stewart-worthy handpainted calligraphy.

Around the words were framed photographs of the family. Connor and Jared playing flag football at a middle-school field day. Morgan and her cello last year at solo and ensemble, cropped from a larger shot of her quartet. There was just one shot of Dinah and Joe, and she realized with a start how long ago it had been taken. Morgan had taken it, and her vantage point was low, so the camera was looking up at the pair of them. They'd been at the beach. Dinah's cheeks were pink with sun and she was laughing hard, because Joe—embracing her from behind—had tickled her at the instant the shutter clicked. Then she'd whirled in the circle of his arms and tackled him to the sand, the element of surprise outweighing his strength. A familywide tickle fight ensued and carried over into the waves and became a splash fight until they were all soaked and laughing and hiccupping. Dinah squinted into the middle distance and tried to remember how old Morgan was at the time. . . . That must have been seven years ago, give or take.

Seven years ago she was laughing with her husband and family on the beach. Now, she and Joe barely talked except to discuss logistics or fight about whether he was ever helping her at home.

Though, now that Dinah was thinking of that picture, and the years before and after, she'd have to be honest and say even before that, closeness was rare between her and Joe. That's why she'd framed the shot even though it was slightly blurry and off-center; it was such a rare, special moment.

She rewound her mental home movies of her family, the twins and Morgan shrinking down to pint-size, herself standing in the not-yet-opened Den, sweeping the scarred hardwood floors.

This took her back to the twins' fragile early days. Her chest tightened to recall the constant state of fear. Her need to control every tiny variable that might affect how the boys developed. Joe trying to help, but not able to soothe the squirmy, colicky Connor or get Jared's tiny toddler glasses to stay on right . . . Dinah tried to teach Joe, show him what she knew, but he snapped at her, accused her of treating him like a child, and she would fire back she was only trying to show him the best way . . . And he began retreating—literally is what she'd been picturing as he walked off to the home office or to some school function—but figuratively, too.

The shiny glare of the cheap sticker and the corny sentiment began to work under Dinah's skin like a sliver. She stood up so quickly that her head spun for just a moment. She took her ragged, chipped nails and went to work on a corner of the thing, until she got a piece of it, and gave a mighty rip. But only the “Fa” ripped off, leaving “mily: The Heart of Every Home,” and for some reason this made her laugh, so she laughed and laughed and kept laughing as she ripped every shred of that ridiculous sticker off her wall, and she laughed even harder when she saw it had been there so long you could see a halo where it used to be and the paint was brighter.

She might have laughed her way through painting over the whole wall, except Jared and Connor started fighting, and she went upstairs to break it up, the wadded remnants of the heart of every home balled up in her fist.

13

R
ain was upside down, as she was often during her workday.

“Breathe into the stretch,” she was telling the class, and she was doing the same, her rear jutting up into the air in downward-facing dog, her back elongating from shoulders to tailbone, stretching the tension right out.

She almost groaned aloud with the pleasure of it; she was loose from teaching almost the full hour—they were winding down now—and it was a deep, satisfying stretch, or “juicy” as Beverly would say. “Yummy” in Layla-speak. She never could get used to that kind of language.

She prompted the class for upward-facing dog, and now her body was facedown along the floor, her legs stretched out flat behind her, up on her hands with elbows gently bent, bending up like a swoop toward the ceiling. Her chest just inside her shoulders yawned out, happily released from the hunching-over posture she fell into much of the rest of the time.

Down to the floor flat, and up again to downward-facing dog . . .

Blackness rushed into the sides of Rain's vision. She gasped quietly and went down on hands and knees, trying to breathe deeply enough so that she wouldn't crumple into a heap in front of twenty women and the retired autoworker.

The class hadn't noticed yet, she could tell. Upside down as they all were, they were looking between their legs at the back of the room.

She should have hydrated more.

Rain prompted the class to come down to hands and knees, and they did, looking at her as they did so, as if they would need help figuring out how to be on all fours. Rain walked them through the steps to
savasana,
but she did not dare lie flat, worrying she might not be able to rise. She sat in half lotus and drank from her water bottle.

Am I?
she wondered.
Could I be, finally?
She could surprise TJ on his birthday on Sunday, welcome him to his thirties with the prospect of being a father, and how perfect would that be? Heading into the true adult decade together, finally on the way to being a family, more than just a couple.

But she'd been down that road so many times. So often she'd have a moment of dizziness, or nausea, or her breasts would feel sore and she'd fly to the computer and look up pregnancy symptoms, especially when she was on Clomid. Early on, she'd gone as far as to calculate her eventual due date, only to have her period arrive a few days later.

But this time was different. This time she'd had Dr. Gould and her injectable drugs on her side, and the perfected timing of medical science, so no matter what the quirks of Rain's individual uterus and hormones, they couldn't fail to get egg and sperm in the uterus together.

It had been ten days since the insemination. The longest ten days of Rain's life since Gran had died.

She prompted the class to sit up and wished them “Namaste.”

She tried to keep the after-class chatter short, not having the patience for it. She just wanted to rush time forward to her next blood test with Dr. Gould, maybe the most important blood test ever.

The last student filed out, and Rain set to straightening the mats in the corner, putting away her own things. Now she just had to help Beverly behind the counter until NYC closed for the evening. With Layla off for the day, it was almost like old times.

She paused before walking out of the studio to look at the lake behind the huge glass windows at the back of the room. Snow dusted the trees around its edges. Such a lovely view, but she usually had her back to it, leading the class.

In the store area, she came upon Beverly arranging some new stock on a shelf: pretty crystals that were supposed to help your chi or whatever.

Beverly noticed her and broke into a wide grin, then immediately the grin dripped away.

“You look so pale,” she said, turning a pink crystal over in one hand.

“Oh, I didn't drink enough water is all,” Rain said, waving her hand through the air, but a smile snuck out anyway.

Beverly looked around quickly for customers; the last one had filed out just moments before. “Are you?” she whispered, though they were alone.

Rain allowed herself to say, “Maybe.”

Beverly's round face burst into joy like a flashbulb. “So exciting!”

Rain's own smile faded as she remembered Beverly's excitement last month and how that ended. Rain hadn't been able to wait for the official doctor's test, and she took a home pregnancy test. It had given her the faintest of second lines. According to the wisdom of the Internet as she frantically searched, the test on the desk next to her, “a line is a line,” meaning it didn't matter how bold or weak, that line meant she was pregnant.

She'd taken the ill-advised step of calling TJ at work, catching him helping a student after school, so he couldn't talk, really, and she couldn't gauge his reaction.

By the time he got home, it was moot. Her period had arrived with the suddenness of an earthquake. Dr. Gould allowed that it might have been an extremely early miscarriage for the test to have registered a faint second line followed by bleeding, and she said it didn't always work the first time.

“Take heart,” she'd said, patting Rain's thin wrist, and Rain thought,
This is taking my heart all the time.

She learned her lesson, in any case, about dabbling in home pregnancy tests. She would wait for the doctor's verdict. Rain realized how much happier she would have been if she'd never even known there was a faint possibility of pregnancy. If she'd only waited a few more hours, her body would have answered the question for her. Ignorance really was bliss.

Rain smiled back at Beverly, but the giddy anticipation she felt in class was gone. Instead came a creeping certainty that this cycle had failed as well. Why couldn't she just sit with the unknown? Why the wild swings from optimism to despair?

She looked at the crystals Beverly had begun to arrange once again. Rain thought she might be desperate enough to try chanting to one in the quest for inner peace. They were cheaper than fertility drugs, after all.

“How is TJ handling all this?” Beverly asked, moving on to a display of incense burners, and then heading behind the counter for her duster.

“Oh, well. It's up and down.”

Rain turned away as she said it, fiddling with some folded T-shirts, which were perfectly folded already.

TJ had grown more and more stormy about the process, ever since the doctor explained to him they'd have to test his fertility, and what exactly that entailed. Then he had to “produce his sample” twice more, for the two cycles of treatment they'd tried thus far. On that day, Rain would try to be optimistic and excited about their future as parents, but TJ would stomp about the house, not speaking, slamming cabinet doors and watching sports on TV with stiff folded arms.

The day after the first failed cycle, in October with the foliage in a riot of oranges and reds, she'd gone for a drive alone, screaming in her car as she barreled along the highway to nowhere, “Do you think this is a cakewalk for me? Do you think I enjoy poking my stomach with needles? Do you think I wanted to get pregnant with my feet up in stirrups with a doctor sticking a turkey baster in my vagina? I'm so sorry you have to jerk off in a tube, but you're not the only one who hates this process, you self-absorbed sonofabitch!”

She pulled over and called Alessia from her cell phone, and her sister-in-law consoled her and mercifully omitted any information about her own pregnancy, though Rain would have liked to be able to innocently celebrate her new niece's or nephew's impending arrival without the bitter taste of envy in the back of her throat.

Then she drove home, shaky with relief and expended anger, and cooked TJ his favorite meal of turkey burgers and roasted redskin potatoes.

Rain abandoned the shirts and turned to Beverly. “Why should this be so damn hard for me? I worried so much about getting pregnant when I was in college. I remember freaking out if my period was one day late, thinking the condom had slipped or something. And everywhere you look, people who have no money, no plan, no sense at all are getting pregnant like it's going out of style . . .” Rain cringed to hear these thoughts out loud for once, instead of just in a loop in her brain. “That's hateful talk.”

Beverly nodded. “Stop being so tough on yourself. You're allowed to have feelings about it that aren't exactly politically correct. Sometimes I think you don't let yourself have feelings at all. As if you and TJ only get a ration of emotion, and he spends it all for the two of you.”

“It's not like that. I like being the stable one. I grew up surrounded by people who just . . .” Rain tried to think of a way to describe Ricky and Angie. “Emoted all over everywhere, regardless of the consequences. When I moved in with Gran, I felt like I could breathe for the first time. There's nothing wrong with being reserved.”

“Just make sure you don't reserve yourself until you suffocate.”

“Yes, Mother Beverly,” Rain said with a grin. “What do you say I count out the cash drawer? I don't see any stampeding hordes of customers.”

“If you must change the subject, go right ahead,” Beverly said, giving Rain a wry smirk.

“What? It's gotta be done, right?”

Rain busied herself with the money, reflecting that although she was grateful to have Beverly as a friend as well as a boss, she rather wished Bev weren't so damn perceptive.

 

On the drive home, Rain felt a telltale heaviness in her lower abdomen.

“No,” she said out loud.

A ball of dread gathered in her chest. Without intending to, she steered the car away from her home, and TJ, whom she imagined was slouched in front of the television, though for all she knew he was working out or grading papers or waiting for her with dinner warm on the table . . .

Okay, well, probably not that last one.

She drove and let her mind wander as much as she dared while still watching the road. She took the entrance ramp onto the highway, joining the flow of cars zipping along past sleepy farms and stands of naked winter trees.

Her car passed the exit for her parents' house. She could not deal with Fawn now, who was having trouble with a teething, cranky baby Brock. The last time she'd been there and Fawn groaned again about his fussiness, Rain wanted to grab her shoulders and scream, “Do you know what I would give?”

She took a familiar exit, figuring something inside her had been planning to go this way all along.

The roads were narrow, and Rain drove slowly, mindful of the ditches alongside filled with icy water. She passed snowcapped mounds of hay rolled into cylinders that she used to pretend were buffaloes, when she'd made this drive with her parents as a little girl.

She cut her lights as she rolled up to the road in front of an old stucco house.

Gran's house.

Not anymore, of course. Ricky and Angie hadn't wanted it when Gran died; they preferred to sell it and take the money, which they burned through rapidly, of course.

There was a light on in the kitchen. Rain rested her head against the seatback, picturing Gran with her tight coils of silver hair sipping from the stoneware coffee mug. Gran was writing letters in fluid script while Rain did her homework at the table. The only sound other than the scratching of their pens was the crickets outside and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall.

Now and then Rain would share something interesting out of her history book, and Gran would nod. Or Rain would ask who she was writing to, and Gran would talk to her about her great-aunt Esther and tell some funny story about Esther as a girl, who was a tomboy and prone to coming home so covered in mud that her mother would turn the hose on her in the yard before letting her inside.

And Rain would drink in the silence, remembering the chaos of her own house where her brother and sister blared their music at all hours and Ricky and Angie came and went on no discernible schedule.

Sometimes she'd worry aloud that she was intruding on Gran's privacy, to which Gran would reply, “Never, my child. You are never a burden to me.”

Gran would have been so proud and happy to see her now, with her good job, nice house, and handsome husband. None of it had come easily, but Gran always said the best things in life were worth waiting for. It took TJ a long time to sow his oats, for example, refusing to exclusively date only her in college though she was lost in him and couldn't even look at another guy.

It wasn't until his brother's opulent wedding to Alessia that he whispered in her ear he wanted to marry her. Even that wasn't the official proposal, and she had to wait another six months for the ring.

Now, they were together, and it was worth every moment of waiting, every spike of jealousy, because she'd shown him in the end that it was her constancy and fidelity that mattered. He thanked her almost daily for loving him.

Gran would have been so happy for her. If only she could have lived long enough to see the wedding.

Rain wiped under her eyes and shook her head, putting the car in reverse to head back home. No sense in crying her mascara down her face, wishing for the impossible.

 

“Honey!” TJ exclaimed, before she'd even put her purse down. He sounded ebullient, giddy even, and Rain's shoulders drooped with relief. This was her favorite TJ, the one she first loved back in college, who could draw in everyone's attention and love like a whirlpool.

“Hey, babe,” she said, realizing just how long she'd been out driving when she glanced at the living room clock. TJ didn't seem to have noticed.

He rushed up to her and swept her up, lifting her off the floor in a hug and kissing her, sweetly, warmly. She giggled under his lips he held the kiss so long, and he finally set her down. She felt a happy swoosh in her belly and thought how lucky she was to still feel this way for her husband.

“I had a great day,” he said.