“Drinks” is something of a misnomer. Half the time, we couldn’t afford drinks. All of the time, we couldn’t afford the depressant. The last thing I needed was to go home and fall asleep at a decent hour. I’d never make up that time. Jill likes to get a beer and a coffee and figures they’ll balance each other out. Katie just eats pastries. But in Seattle, strange religious tenets notwithstanding, even the Mormons go to coffee shops. As in England, where everyone has their pub, in Seattle, everyone has their coffee shop. Ours is away from campus, minimizing the chance of running into our classmates, or worse, our students, or much worse, our professors. Most coffee shops are kept a bit cool—in part because it’s hard to insulate against so much rain and chill but really to encourage you to buy more hot beverages. Joe Bar, however, is warm, dark, and nooky. It also has tables out front for when it gets finally sunny. April is usually not quite spring in spirit in Seattle, but it had stopped raining, and Katie and Jill were outside braving the chill when I arrived. They were sharing an egg salad sandwich. And fighting about eggs. When I sat down, Jill was saying, “It’s just exactly like we’re eating dead baby chicks on rye.”
“No it’s not,” Katie insisted. “The eggs you eat aren’t fertilized.”
“Chickens have sex, and then they lay eggs.”
“No they don’t.”
“Of course they do.”
“No, it’s like fish. She lays the egg and then the rooster comes and fertilizes it. Or, in this case, the farmer grabs it before it gets fertilized. That’s why we’re not eating dead baby chicks.”
“How does he?”
“He just takes it out of the henhouse.”
“Not the farmer. The rooster,” said Jill. “How could he fertilize an egg that was already out of the hen? Does he have a little drill bit on the tip of his penis?”
“I don’t know,” said Katie. “Maybe the eggs are soft when they first come out and then he sticks it in and then it hardens up later.”
“No, because if it came out soft, it would get hay and shit in there. The whole point of the shell is to protect the baby chick.”
“I guess that’s true,” said Katie, resigned, like she couldn’t possibly trump logic that solid. This is a good demonstration of why I don’t eat eggs unless they look like something else. Scrambled, quiched, in a cake, or I’m not interested. This is also a good demonstration of why we aren’t in graduate school for biology.
“What brought up chicken reproduction?” I asked as if there could really be a satisfactory explanation.
“Katie thinks it’s romantic that chickens mate for life,” said Jill.
“That’s geese,” I said.
“Maybe swans,” said Katie. “Maybe cranes?”
“Why are you talking about animals who mate for life?” I took a stab at getting back to the point.
“I was thinking about it for my Great Expectations paper,” said Katie, as if that explained everything.
“How were office hours?” Jill asked. “I can’t believe you’re still holding them. Classes are over. It’s reading period.”
“How can they make excuses about late papers if I don’t hold office hours? It was fine. One squashed computer, one lost assignment sheet, one actual rough draft to go over, and one pregnancy scare.”
“Two,” said Jill, her mouth full of egg salad.
“Two what?”
“Two pregnancy scares,” said Jill.
“No,” I said, just one, just Isabel.
“Also me,” said Jill. And because we were both looking at her blankly, not getting it, she added, “I think I’m pregnant.”
Katie paled. She had always known, of course, that this is what comes from sex among the unwed. But it seemed a great tragedy to her already. In the couple seconds of silence that followed Jill’s bemused announcement, Katie pictured her wretched and wandering the frozen streets of London circa 1850, torn and dirty shawl wrapped around a screaming, malnourished infant, looking for men to whom to prostitute herself in exchange for a desperate scrap of bread. This is the way for Victorianists. A Shakespearean, I took the news better though what flashed briefly through my brain was a montage of after-school specials on how to avoid this very situation.
“What makes you think so?” I asked.
“I’m late,” Jill said.
“April stress?” Katie suggested hopefully.
“And we weren’t being especially . . . safe,” Jill admitted.
“Still . . .” said Katie.
“And I looked at my cervix. It’s blue.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. Probably she didn’t need this display of annoyance, but I couldn’t help it. Foggy though she was on chicken reproduction, Jill had a grossly detailed hold on her own. She thinks she knows when she’s ovulating and all that crap, so she doesn’t use birth control when she thinks she doesn’t need it. Which, obviously, doesn’t always work.
In conversations like this one, it’s hard to know what to say first. Katie got right to the point, breathing, “What will you do?” at the exact same moment I tried the more practical, “Have you told Dan?”
“I don’t know,” said Jill, the least fazed of all of us by far. “And not yet. You’re the first.”
We were pretty well done with Thursday afternoon drinks.
Four
On the way home, I stopped at the store for snow peas, asparagus, carrots, and a pregnancy test. At times like these, April times, I deal with almost everything by chopping vegetables into tiny, tiny pieces. The best thing about learning how to cook hadn’t been the vast improvement in meal quality but the unexpected revelation that cooking is insanity management. During especially stressful days, I close my eyes and reassure myself that if I can make it through the afternoon, I get to go home to red peppers and my paring knife.
Later, while we were waiting in the living room, silent on separate sofas, as Jill limply held a plastic wand she’d just peed on a little bit away from her with a slightly sick expression (Jill, for all her willingness to examine her own cervix regularly, is a bit squeamish about pee, poop, blood, and germs—something she’d probably need to get over if she had a baby), I had a brief, strange flash of wishing it were me. It’s conventional wisdom that it’s best not to have a baby if you are poor, barely employed, absurdly overworked, without plan or direction, and totally single. But it’s also conventional wisdom that you’ll never have a baby if you wait until you’re ready, in fact, that you’ll never do anything if you always wait for conditions to meet ideals, and for me, this wisdom extends to a further important truth—I’ll never do anything if I have to decide. Decision making is not my strong suit. But my strange jealousy was not only about its being appealing to have something so monumental just thrust upon me. I thought it would have been comforting, a relief, to know.
We waited.
“Pink,” Jill said, three minutes later, holding it up for us to see. “Flaming pink. Magenta. Fuchsia. Crimson.”
“It looks pretty sure,” Katie admitted.
I stood up, removed the wand from Jill’s hand, walked to the kitchen, deposited it unceremoniously in the garbage, washed my hands, started chopping vegetables, and burst into tears. Neither Jill nor Katie was moved by this. Each sat still and stunned. I made dinner while they freaked out alone in their own heads. When half an hour later I returned to the living room with food and nothing had changed, I figured it was my job to bring it up. At a loss, I began this way: “What are the options?” I am a fan of options, of listing them, ruminating over them. Maybe not a fan. More of an addict. I can’t help myself. I have to consider everything. The truth is though, as anyone who has ever been or thought about being pregnant in the whole history of time could tell you, there are only ever, at most, three options, and unless you are delighted about the first, they are very, very difficult to talk about.