26.
Will left the next morning for his job at the law firm—the same job he’d had the summer before—without speaking to me after the stupid fight. I pulled out the bikini pattern and the ball of yellow yarn and started in, ready to apply myself. “Chain four, join into a ring with a slip stitch.” Easy. But then it told me to single crochet three times into the center of the ring and there was a problem: I couldn’t find the ring. Carmen said it would be obvious, where the ring was, because it would look like a hole. But I poked at it and separated the stitches and I could not find it. I crocheted three times into the center of what I thought was the ring, only to realize it wasn’t. A few rounds of that and I realized I was screwed, unable to start the bikini I was dying to start.
“Damn it!” I yelled. I hurled the yarn, furious at it, wanting it away from me. It landed on the rug by the coffee table as the buzzer rang. Mom and Vanessa were coming over for a makeshift shower-breakfast, which was really just an excuse to see our new place.
They arrived together, not on purpose, throwing their coats on Florence’s accordion rack in the hallway. Mom plunked a Babies “R” Us shopping bag onto the coffee table and pulled what looked like a stereo receiver out of a box inside it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a pump,” she said. Vanessa and I looked dumbly at her.
“Tell me you know what a breast pump is.” The black box was connected by clear thin tubes to a pair of baby bottles with suction cups on top. She plugged it into the wall, but nothing happened.
“I don’t think that outlet works,” I said.
“Of course it doesn’t,” she grumbled as I glanced nervously at Vanessa, whose brilliant idea it had been to get together that morning. “Is there one that does?”
“The other side of the couch,” I said.
Mom lifted the black box and plopped it onto the far end of the coffee table so that the cord could reach the outlet. A whining whirr came and went in waves. She held up the suction cups with the tubes dangling to the floor.
“Annie had one of these,” she said. Annie was one of the managers at Fiona’s. She’d had her daughter, Tamsin, when she was forty-six. “You attach these little cups to your nips and it leaves your hands free to drink coffee and open your mail. Come here.”
She reached over to the armchair where I was sitting and lifted up my shirt.
“Don’t!” Vanessa cried. “You’ll make her go into labor! I read that in her book. Nipple stimulation can bring on contractions.”
“Why are you reading her pregnancy book?” Mom glared at Vanessa. “You don’t have anything better to do?”
“What, it’s fun.” Vanessa crossed her legs, embarrassed, and pushed the plate of chocolate croissants she’d brought toward Mom.
“Anyway, after the first month Annie stopped nursing altogether and just pumped.” She took a sip from the latte in her paper cup and looked at me pointedly. “She said it saved her booby dolls.”
“I’ll remember that, Mom,” I said. “But I’m not as obsessed with my booby dolls as you are.” If my mother weighed 130 pounds or under, she liked to wear her Steven Sprouse polyester button-downs from the seventies that she’d bought at a flea market in London. She said she couldn’t wear them if she went over 130 because the fabric would stretch across her chest and stomach in between the buttons and she hated the way that looked. I knew what she meant, but I thought it looked trampy in a good way. When she wore the shirts, her boobs were her booby dolls, her friends, as in, “My booby dolls and I are going to Healthy Bagel.” But when she felt fat, she’d lie in bed and watch them fall off to either side, her chin burrowed into her collarbone, scrutinizing. Then they were her “craven globes.” “Fie on thee, craven globes,” she’d say. When I was little, I thought she’d said, “Pie on thee.” I thought it meant Dad had made his chocolate-chip pecan pie, which he did sometimes when he was hungover.
“So it’s nice here, right?” I asked Vanessa, afraid to look at Mom. “It’s a great deal. We’re paying her rent, and she’s on rent control. It was perfect for her because she didn’t want to sublet to anyone she didn’t know and she didn’t have any takers in the two months she’s been away. We lucked out.”
“I love it,” Vanessa said quickly. “It has a cool, Village-y artist vibe. Is she an artist? I love the windows.”
“She’s a sculptor,” I said. “And she makes jewelry. And now she’s teaching in Africa.”
“Where the hell is it going to sleep?” Mom asked, shaking her head in dismay. “The closet?”
“The baby doesn’t need anything at first,” I said, lifting the wrapped box Vanessa had brought out of the bag. “Anyway, we can’t afford anything else.”
“Please,” said Mom. “No poor-unwed-teenager thing. Please. We’re avoiding that like the bubonic plague. Remember.”
Vanessa chuckled, which eked a hint of a smile out of Mom. I watched Mom as she cut one of the croissants in half, and I was grateful that she’d at least made an effort to bury her disappointment in me and come over.
“Vanessa, when do you leave for school?” Mom asked.
“End of August.” Vanessa sighed. “We’re going to Maine for two weeks after Nickelodeon ends, then we’re back for, like, a night, and then I go.” She made a sad face at me.
My phone flashed. I reached for it on the side table and saw a text from Will. “Sry I wuz a jrk last nite. I luv u.”
I shook Vanessa’s box, relieved and happy about Will’s apology. “Clothes,” I said.
She rocked mischievously back and forth on the couch. “Open it.”
It was a stuffed dog with calico patches all over it and lopsided men’s ties for ears.
“Isn’t he cool?” she asked, hopping in her seat. “I thought it was the cutest thing.”
I smiled, thinking about all of the stuff we still needed—a crib, a baby tub, those onesie suits that covered their feet. All of a sudden it seemed totally pathetic, my shower—Mom shifting around on the couch as though it had nits on it, my teenage best friend who didn’t know any better than to buy me an ugly stuffed dog.
“It’s very sweet,” I said. “He or she will love it.”
“When are you going to find out the gender, for God’s sake?” Mom asked. “It’s so creepy–new agey not to find out right away these days.”
“We want it to be a surprise,” I said.
“It’s a surprise no matter when you find out,” Mom said impatiently.
“Well, I should go. It’s ten-thirty.” Vanessa stood up, hiking her wrinkled linen pants over her hips.
“You’re skinny,” I said.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Anyone looks skinny to you right now.” She patted my belly and kissed my mother on each cheek. “Bye, Fiona.”
She nodded and slung her big fake white-leopard-skin bag over her shoulder. “It’s great, Thee, really. I wish I were living here.”
The door banged loudly, the metal of the old locks jangling with it. Mom pressed her finger on the plate, retrieving fallen croissant flakes. For the first time in my life with her, there was a heavy and awkward silence.
I looked at my blinking phone again. Another message from Will. I hadn’t answered the first one. “Helu? You forgive me, yes?” I quickly texted him back. “Y. I luv u.” I tossed the phone where Vanessa had been sitting, feeling grown up and proud of us for maneuvering through our fight so gracefully.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Mom said slowly. “About that stuff with Dad. That night, when he came over.”
“Oh.” I shrugged. I wondered why she was bringing it up out of nowhere.
“It must seem like we’ve always hated each other, he and I.”
“I know you don’t hate him,” I said.
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She recrossed her legs and I watched her small, round knees move underneath her black pants and wondered how it was that I had such big knees, such big bones. “He’s waiting for this to blow up too,” she said. “It’s all we can do. It’s hard. For both of us, in our different ways, it’s hard.”
“It might not, you know,” I said. “Blow up.”
She looked at me as though she were considering something. Music from a car radio drifted in. I had a weird urge to tell her that her life with Dad had not been a waste. That she hadn’t wasted her life, that she’d been living a full life then, with its long, loud red nights at Fiona’s and its siren voices and everyone’s love problems and drama. That her having me and raising me hadn’t been a waste of time either.
“Thanks for coming,” I said. The visit was sliding away from me, but I felt unready for her to leave. I wondered how sometimes my mother could feel so familiar—the smell of her room, the way she tapped her brush against the sink before she turned on the hair dryer—and yet how I could still have such an unclear picture of her. How I could not know whether she was happy, or what made her happy, what she thought about when she shut her eyes at night. I thought of her unbuttoning her shirt and throwing it onto the silk chair in her room, and the pull of skin across her cheeks after she washed her face, but it was like looking at her through a window from across the street.
“And thank you for the money, and the pump, and everything else,” I said. “Have some faith in me, Ma.” I tried to say it jokingly, but the words spilled out of me in an awkward rush. “The details might not be all there, but the feelings make sense. It feels real. That’s important, you know.”
“It feels real,” she repeated, looking to me. “What does that mean?”
“It feels like what we’re doing is right. Can you just believe me that it does? Even if it doesn’t seem right to you? We’re going to make it work. I love him. We’re going to make it.”
“I’d like to believe you.” She pulled a tissue out of a pack in her bag and brushed any loose crumbs off her lipsticked mouth. “I would.”